Installing hood struts on the Nissan Navara (Frontier) D40 pickup

One of the main gripes with working under the hood of the Nissan Navara D40 is that there are no hood struts, only a slightly flimsy prop. Fortunately these are a super easy upgrade, and will only cost around 20 euros.

In the pic here is a no-name eBay kit for the Nissan. Build quality is ok given the price, fitment is ok (but not great), and installation...well it is an easy job once you figure out what to do. Like any generic eBay product, this came with no instructions so it took a while to figure out what goes where. The install itself is over in about 10 minutes.

The product is advertised as "no drilling" and that is accurate. The lower ball joint for the strut bolts directly on a 10mm bolt on the fender. The ball part will need to face forward as otherwise the strut will not fit to compress.

The upper ball joint bolts directly on the hood hinge, 12mm I believe. Removing the bolts of a heavy hood was a little scary to do when working alone, but fortunately the hood stays solidly on the hinge bolts even with the nuts removed and it does not need to be removed from the hinge. The ball of the joint is again facing front, only obviously outward this time.

The strut clips on to the ball joints and holds well. Unlike on some cars, one strut is not strong enough to keep the heavy truck hood up by itself so pay attention to that.

Once installed, there is no more room for the factory hood prop. The prop itself comes out with not tools, you just need to wiggle it quite a bit as the end has a number of bends.

The plastic holder that is used to keep the factory prop in place must be removed as it interferes with the strut when closing the hood. The piece has small clips on the side, you can carefully push these down with a small screwdriver to help release the part.

This is what the left side looks like with the strut installed. The lower joint does not fit quite as well as the right side, but it will likely have no impact in use.

Interestingly the kit also came with two thin angled spacers / corner pieces that have no purpose in the install, even though it was labelled as a Nissan Navara/Frontier specific part.